Lifelong effects of concussions, particularly concussions incurred in childhood, have been discovered in recent years. These effects may include memory loss, depression, and dementia, to name a few. One of the issues with concussion detection is the amount of equipment and time it takes to provide a clinician with suitable information from which to diagnose the concussion. For example, many concussion symptom detection systems require specialized facilities (e.g., special rooms with precisely controlled lighting) or expensive and bulky equipment (e.g., CAT scan equipment, MRI equipment). Other concussion detection systems are time consuming, such as the ImPACT Test, a written examination administered by computer a predetermined amount of time (e.g., hours) after an injury, with the result compared to pre-injury performance on the same written examination.
Some concussion symptom detection systems are also susceptible to manipulation. For example, for written examinations an athlete (anticipating possible concussion during the season but not wanting to lose playing time) may intentionally perform poorly on a pre-injury written examination so as to mask the degradation of post-injury performance on the same written examination. Moreover, given that the written examination questions may be freely available, an athlete may further attempt to skew the post-injury written examination results by studying and/or memorizing the examination questions and answers prior to application of the post-injury written examination.
For related-art concussion symptom detection systems that track eye movement, the manipulation happens during calibration of pupil position to gaze location. That is, related-art concussion symptom detection systems first calibrate pupil position to gaze location on the screen by having the patient stare intently at a plurality of predetermined locations on the screen, and from the relationship between pupil position and the predetermined locations a calibration is determined. The athlete manipulates the results of the initial testing by intentionally not looking directly at the predetermined locations, thus skewing the pre-injury testing to lower performance levels.